Monday, July 20, 2009

What do the Rezzables consider serious?

A phrase in the Rezzables' announcement of their SimBot irked me. I mean I'm sure it's all innocent and they're being unfairly maligned for wanting to share this revolutionary new product - one which not only slices and dices, it backs up all of the products of your brilliant and cutting edge mind. The fact that it also takes stuff that doesn't belong to you is just a small annoyance and totally not intended to cause grief for anybody.

But that phrase "serious content creators" is bothersome. This product is intended for the use of "serious content creators". It is intentional and the variation of it that is used in the comments under the original announcement i.e., "serious builders" is not an improvement. So I had to think about what exactly the almighty Rezzables might mean by "serious". I mean it's obvious the product isn't expected to be useful to all content creators - just the "serious" ones. So I decided to analyze the situation and attempt to try and decipher the real meaning behind the phrase. Allow me to share my conclusions:

I think it's fair to stipulate that, because the product would be intended for "serious content creators" and it was built for them, the Rezzables consider themselves "serious content creators".

I think it's also fair to assume that they don't consider me a "serious content creator". After all they've never heard of me. True I spent more than a year assembling my first product line. I just spent 3 months doing nothing but developing my recent product. But I don't think it's just focus, effort and/or quality that they are considering in the "serious content creator" category.

Maybe you have to own a minimum number of sims - but then all the land barons would qualify and that's just not possible.

So maybe it's a minimum level of revenue. But then the Rezzables wouldn't qualify so that would be silly.

Maybe you have to value your content highly enough that you would want to back it up. But if you valued your content that much you wouldn't want a tool out there that others could use to steal what you have created. In fact, I think that would be the antithesis of a "serious content creator".

Maybe if I go back and analyze the original motivation behind the product. They built it to back up their sims for a move to their new open sim. A virtual "moving van" if you will. In fact, the reason the product doesn't care if you own the content you're copying is because they didn't need that control. So perhaps "serious content creators" are the ones planning to depart for as yet undiscovered worlds. This has possibilities.

Consider as well their pursuit (an admirable one I might add) for revenue. They have this bright (I assume) shiny (I assume) new toy for everybody to play with in the form of their new virtual world. I mean I assume they want other people to go there - otherwise it's just a weird technology based form of masturbation.

So .............. maybe a "serious content creator" refers to people moving to other worlds and, for the purposes of Rezzable revenue, the Rezzable world in particular (I'd put in a link but I don't have one and this is all speculation anyway. ).

If that conclusion is correct then, based on the design of the product, we also need to expand the definition of "content creator" to include somebody who creates content by copying in this world and pasting in another one. Note that the content in this world does not have to be theirs. Once it is in the other world they can claim creation rights and get a gold star. A "serious content creator" would be somebody who copies an entire sim of content in this world and pastes it in another one. Wow think how many gold stars you'd get for that!

Either the Rezzables believe that a "serious content creator" doesn't want to remain on SL .... or they believe that builders will want to prove that they are "serious content creators" by buying something that other people will use to rip them off. Some residents accuse them of being arrogant, self-absorbed and/or spiteful. Whatever the truth may be, in this case I have to agree with the Rezzables. I am not their version of a "serious content creator" however they define it and I will not be in the market for this product.

4 comments:

Felt the same way you did when I read that little gem. I think Rezzables could have saved themselves a lot of headaches by replacing "serious content creator" with "Sim Builder". This is a sim builders tool, and really at its best its a Lazy Sim Builders tool. But I think they need to rethink a LOT of what was in that post.

My theory is that they used that phrase to try (with questionable success) to give an impression like "this was written by and for honest and upstanding creative people who have better things to do with their time than rip off other people's stuff, and we are too busy being honest and upstanding and serious to waste time worrying about those slimy content-stealing types".

the WONDERFUL thing about this "professional" tool is that it removes all creator imprints. totally. no matter how aggregated or diverse the SIM's build team, once you flush it through, any and all attributions are gone.

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I'm a resident of Second Life and I created this blog originally as a way to record my learning and development inworld. These days I post a lot of travelogues sprinkled with the occasional vent or off topic musings. Mostly I'm about community and builds and art and the wonder that is this virtual world.